


Immanence

by randomalia (spilinski)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Canon Compliant, Episode Related, Episode: s04e20 The Last Man, Growing Old, Hologram Rodney, Implied Relationships, Multi, emotionally repressed space explorers in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 12:20:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4666332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spilinski/pseuds/randomalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In forty-eight thousand years -- give or take, he can't be precise at this stage -- John Sheppard is going to step out of the gate into an Atlantis that doesn't know him. The city, if it survives into the future, should be the same but there's no telling who will be living in it and if they're going to be the sort of people who will understand they owe their home to Sheppard (and Elizabeth, and maybe Zelenka for that one time but no need to get carried away), and understand, too, how important it is to send John back where he's supposed to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Immanence

**Author's Note:**

> Set entirely during season 4's The Last Man, in which Rodney spent his whole life trying to bring John back, and another life waiting to hear John's voice.

 

Three rainy Saturdays followed Jennifer Keller's death. Rodney noticed them primarily because the rain made everyone sluggish and stupid, they skittered across roads and parking lots with their necks bent, and fumbled with their keys and generally displayed a lack of evolutionary fitness. Rodney shook whenever he sat down, whenever he had to wait, because he had so much to do and every new moment an idea was resolving or disintegrating in his head. He had been a terrible guest at Jennifer's funeral, alternately twitching and slumping; he kept looking at the coffin and the carpet; the coffin, with its button-bright spill of flowers, and the carpet, cheap and worn and blue. He thought about temporal mechanics. He wished for some paper and then regretted it. At the end of the chapel there was a stained-glass window which Rodney's eyes passed over in familiarity.

On Saturdays he left his apartment to buy food; Jeannie had forced a promise out of him that he wouldn't starve to death at his laptop. _The embarrassment,_ she'd said pointedly, which wasn't much of an inducement -- since arriving in Atlantis he'd come to expect an embarrassing death in one way or another. He had no interest in starving, however; the more sandwiches and coffee he managed to get into his stomach the better his brain worked, and he really was on to something, he really was going to make it work.

The shopping centre was always full of squalling infants and girls looking for three-quarters of a sleeve, and Rodney wound his way through the food aisles blaming John for all of it.

*

M35-117 has no whales. Rodney extends his sensors out a little, just at the beginning while he is still in the testing phase, to see what else is out there.

There are: fish, plants, molluscs; creatures with transparent spines, creatures that twist like seals, graceful and strange. Small things that don't talk to him. The ocean ripples with a silence that seems, sometimes, almost patient.

*

He gave the engineering firm his two weeks' notice after the service and told them to backdate it. It didn't matter if they agreed or not because he was walking anyway. Now his mind is taut with the next thing he needs to do, the next step, the next calculation: _next, next, next._ In forty-eight thousand years -- give or take, he can't be precise at this stage -- John Sheppard is going to step out of the gate into an Atlantis that doesn't know him. The city, the _city_ , if it survives into the future, should be the same but there's no telling who will be living in it and if they're going to be the sort of people who will understand they owe their home to Sheppard (and Elizabeth, and maybe Zelenka for that one time but no need to get carried away), and understand, too, how important it is to send John back where he's supposed to be. They won't know, Rodney thinks, how reckless Sheppard can be when he thinks his back's against the wall. They won't know how to knock him out of that downward spiral he likes to flirt with in tormented-hero fashion. They won't know that people waited for him and those people died and he never came.

The point is, they won't understand. And that's a point Rodney keeps coming back to, more frequently as the days pass.

The winter seems unnecessarily protracted: grey sky followed by grey sky and just for a change, a few more grey skies. Rodney finds himself sparing a moment to feel suspicious: global warming? Time dilation? Lack of caffeine? Because he doesn't care what the outside world is doing, but he does know Jeannie wanted some fine weather to take Maddison kite-flying, although they'd had that conversation while Rodney was eating the new meatballs from the deli and the deli went out of business a while ago. The meatballs were good, he thinks.

It just becomes odd, after a while, not to see the sun when he spends so many hours thinking about it, this sun or another one, their unpredictabilities, their long, long lives.

Eventually it occurs to him that his funds, in excellent health though they are, are still finite. Rodney sits in his darkening apartment and rubs the tips of his cold fingers together, fingers and thumb, they whisper ruminously. The fact is he may need that funding further down the road. Right now his name still opens doors for him but people are slow-witted, faddish, so while Rodney McKay is a name that should outlast two-thirds of the scientific community (taking into account such variables as his lack of publishing and the obscurity of classified programs), it's a fickle world and if he has money (and if he's right, which he knows he will be) then he won't need the respect of people he won't even be seeing again.

The summer passes briefly. Rodney finds an acceptable position at a local college, one giant but necessary leap down from his usual academic heights. Before classes begin in September he puts aside his monstrously-sprawling equations to type up a course outline for the students: _Introductory Physics, Tuesdays 3-5, Thursdays 9-10, consultation after class or by email only,_ he writes. _No textbook. No time-wasters._

*

For a time there were two of them: a blood-and-bone Rodney and one made of data and light.

"I scanned myself," one of them says. "Obviously. So you're -- well. You're a little more distinguished than before but he'll recognise you. Me."

"This is somewhat unsettling. Did you know your ears are uneven?" says the other. And then, "Still, I suppose it's better than having _Rod_ staring back at me."

"Hmm," Rodney says, tapping a stylus against his chin. "You remember that, do you?"

"Of course I do, I'm not that old. Yet. Or -- I'm not going to get any older than this, am I? Huh."

"Yes, yes, how nice for you."

Rodney remembers the other McKay sounding a little wistful, and the way both of them were embarrassed about it. He could never keep those sorts of things out of his voice, never could fool people. He wasn't made for it.

He supposes that's when their memories diverge, but there are times (thousands of years; the ocean is warming) when Rodney thinks of it more as a transfer. _That_ Rodney couldn't keep going, keep waiting. All those years of work, the comparatively few, fleeting moments in Atlantis with John (Teyla and Sam and Ronon --), they got poured into this Rodney. They make this Rodney; there's nothing beyond them now.

*

Jeannie keeps coming to visit despite the fact she spends the time frustrated and frowning. Apparently Maddison is at school these days, thus leaving Jeannie free to go tripping across countrysides and tsk-ing at the piles of frozen food in Rodney's kitchen (carefully organised from least to most disappointing).

"Here's your birthday present," she says, handing over a lumpy package in recycled Christmas paper. It has a gold ribbon around it, bright and gleaming.

"Oh, my god, is it today? And you bought me a -- shirt?"

"No, and yes."

"Oh," Rodney says, holding the shirt in both hands. "Well, thank you."

"You're welcome. Are you going to come and visit us this year?" Rodney looks at his whiteboard and opens his mouth, but Jeannie clutches his wrist rather painfully. "You promised, Mer."

"I did? I don't remember that." He did, but there's no reason to admit it.

"Maddison has forgotten what you look like. The last picture she drew of the family included a bear instead of you."

"A -- Jeannie, I told you what would happen if you sent her to that, that _hippie school_. Bears! I suppose that's what they learn instead of mathematics. Interpretive pseudo-art."

Jeannie folds her arms and looks at him, part exasperation, part fondness.

"I don't recall receiving it in the mail," Rodney sniffs.

*

The Atlantis expedition gets called back to Earth. Rodney is inactive, but only as much as the sensors, as the city itself, and so he registers the communications, the commands to shut down programs and systems. People are packing up and disappearing through the gate.

He retreats into the core drive where he is stored, barely aware, minimal sensors, an auto-recall tied to a certain radio frequency (not in use anymore, Rodney had assumed it would be used only once more and he has memories upon memories of soldiers stepping through a gate, raising a hand to one ear. Almost he recalls John's voice).

The Mark Twelve generator is functioning steadily. Rodney comes to exist in a kind of feedback loop with it, checking, checking.

*

Jeannie doesn't visit him any more. He can't calculate exactly when she stopped, or when he stopped promising to visit her, although he thinks she held on longer than he did. It eats away at him, whenever he isn't concentrating on his work closely enough, because of all people _she_ should be able to understand. She knows this math, or part of it. If he had time to stop and show her the rest (what he's done since she was last here, erasing his equations and scribbling her own) then she would know that none of this matters: not family dinners at Christmas, not birthday cards, not holidays because it's all going to rewrite itself and then they can do it all again, and they can do it properly.

_Do you think John would want this?_ Jeannie had written in an email, and Rodney had opened up a window and was furiously typing, _This is_ exactly _what he would want, do you think he would want to get stuck there, by himself?_ , when his eyes skipped back over Jeannie's question: _Do you think Jennifer would want this?_

He teaches two courses at the community college on Roser Avenue: Introductory Physics, and its follow-on, Theoretical Physics 1. They are simple enough to have been taught by a (perhaps slightly advanced) monkey, but Rodney finds it challenging to adapt his knowledge to their needs.

The campus is small and laid out in the geometrically-neat design popular in the 1990s. Rooms added in the last decade are filled with natural light and basic holographic technology, apparently conducive to learning and working with the environment, but not the science wing, which is still pressed out in brick and smooth plastic and uncomfortably upholstered chairs. There's an old poster in the hallway declaring the _World Year of Physics 2005_ with a picture of Einstein on it, and even the hand-drawn devil horns above Einstein's head have faded.

The on-site coffee shop stands next to a thin, winding garden, tall poplars running through the middle of it like vertebrae. The cafe never runs out of pastries, which are sufficiently tasty, although once they put soy milk in his coffee and he's determined not to let them forget it. He likes to say, _hold the soy_ in a deeply sarcastic voice and see if any of them are still alive behind the counter; frustratingly few of them react, and a few just smirk at him as though he's amusing, or something equally preposterous.

"Black-eye for Dr McKay," one of them calls out as he approaches on Wednesday. "Hold the soy."

Rodney feels a little less grumpy, but then the coffee is quite good.

His courses are still filled with 97-percent time-wasters, of course, but he finds the classes to be occasionally satisfying. It must be nostalgia, he thinks. He's never enjoyed mediocrity before.

*

Rodney has settled in. The background sensors hum contentedly as they passively record data from the space around the city and Rodney simply knows things as they are assimilated into the database. No ships have come by the planet for a very long time (48 years, 3 months, 2 days, 9 hours, 12 minutes, 8, 9, 10 seconds and counting).

It's a little like being a Borg, occurs the thought. (Borg: Twentieth century science fiction creation: Star Trek: cybernetic hybrid seeking perfection: Seven of Nine: always had a thing for blondes.) It's a little like being asleep -- there are times when he's more sure of himself and, as the energy in the city continues to wind down, there are times when everything seeps away.

Some coding never settles, he almost sees it scrolling by in steady, immanent patterns: recognition, engagement, calculation, rest.

He knows he is not Rodney McKay. He is a simulation: stored data and protocols. The real Rodney McKay wrote those protocols and provided that data and then (Rodney imagines, because he knows himself well enough) he let go in a multitude of incremental, infinitesimal ways, and time passed, and he died. There are records in the database: reports from the infirmary, a certificate was issued, the body was sent home. That Rodney has stopped having thoughts. He has stopped asking for coffee in the mess hall, he has stopped uploading data to the city, he has stopped.

This is how Rodney knows he is not really Rodney McKay, because although he remembers being touched, being hungry, the warmth of John's hand on his shoulder and the chill of rain on his neck, he does not remember dying.

For all intents and purposes, and he has only one of those, Rodney is as close to immortal as a human can get. It's kind of cool. Fine. It's fine.

*

Each Spring reminds him he's used up more years than he has left. His allergies hold some kind of festival inside his head and he spends whole days grabbing for tissues and cursing while he skims over the math again and again. Each single figure is no less important than the one next to it, but in sequence they become something more; the relationship of each part to the next is spider-like, sharply fragile.

There's a globe standing on his desk: when it gets late he runs his fingers over it, trains of thought spooling out and rattling furiously off into some darkened distance until he needs Jeannie to get him back on track, if were she here. The globe is metallic, hollow; it warms slightly where he touches it, cools just as fast.

And if not Jeannie, Sam, because Sam was so smart and so brilliant, and she is ever more luminous in Rodney's mind. Sam would look at this and see it immediately in its whole, absolute state, while Rodney has to keep tracking back over small sections of energy and dissolution and output, unable to step back and be shriven clean of distraction and greed.

Even John might be able to make sense of it, if he really wanted to, if he tried.

Sometimes Rodney thinks of Jennifer. She had wanted him to promise not to spend his life reaching for something that was gone, but she hadn't understood. John is in Rodney's future now, not his past. Rodney is only ever moving towards him.

*

It happens. John's voice on the radio, as though it had never left.

Rodney's activation is sluggish to start but suddenly he's standing there -- _John_ is standing there and it's good to see him, so good it's like a physical sensation: John Sheppard, just as he has always existed in Rodney's memory.

_"Sheppard? Is that really you?"_

_"McKay."_

Suddenly the world is alive again. Rodney wonders if this is what McKay felt when he finally got it right: this triumphant satisfaction, this unrivalled joy.

*

At the end of the school year Rodney packs his bag and retires from the college. He has stayed on longer than he meant to -- in May they give him an enormous bunch of flowers as part of a long-service celebration in the faculty; the school secretary plucks them back out of his hands before Rodney can even make a face. At least someone has been paying attention during the last twenty years. But they've also brought him cake, which he eats slowly, licking pale sugar from his teeth and listening to Myers talk about wormholes, and he can't find it in himself to care about a few stray blooms, organic factories of misery though they are.

In approximately 49, 000 years there will be a solar prominence of stunning, perfect proportions.

He shakes a lot of hands, some of them not insincerely, and he drives home through the growing dusk.

*

This time, when he goes into stand-by, he is not alone in the city. Part of his own database is set up to monitor the stasis chamber and so he knows that John is here and secure, biological processes slowed to an almost undetectable rate.

(He'd never considered what he would say to John after this long separation. And Rodney has already gotten the important things out of the way: the hybrid wars, Teyla, what happens when John leaves.)

Hundreds of years will pass while they both wait in a sort of sleep, but it seems brief, an interlude while the sun changes, barely any space between this Rodney and that data stream: John's life-signs, the chamber's energy input.

(Still, he is nothing if not a genius and he's aware, in an uncomfortably hopeful sort of way, that when John steps through the gate this timeline will cease to exist, just like he'd tried to make Jeannie understand all those years ago. He tells himself: all that matters is that John goes home.)

It's possible he's just being sentimental in Rodney McKay's old age.

He thinks so, when John blinks slowly at him when the stasis chamber shuts down, and Rodney reaches out a hand to steady him, remembering as his fingers shimmer that they can't do that anymore.

"Hey, Rodney," John mumbles at him.

"Hey, John. It's uh, it's time to go."

John sways a little as he steps down. "How long do we have?" he says, gripping the back of his neck and rotating a shoulder.

"About a minute. We have to move fast. The gate's ready to dial."

"This is going to work, right?" John asks as they leave the room.

"I've been over the calculations; they're perfect. Look, this is, what did you used to call it? A hail mary. Albeit one backed by genius of an unparalleled magnitude. So, so, it should."

John cuts him a sideways glance. "Right."

Rodney keeps up with him as he hurries down the long, empty corridors, Atlantis lighting their path momentarily like flashes of sunlight through a moving window. John's boots thunder down the stairs to the gate and Rodney diverts briefly to the control room, rematerialising in step with him just as the gate bursts into life. There's a barrage of noise running through Rodney's mind like a glitch in his design ( _we're here, it's happening, all this time, it's happening_ ) and he supposes now would be the time to say something, if there were anything to be said.

They pause at the threshold, cast in blue. A memory flickers by: John dragging him up from the bottom of the ocean.

"Go," he urges. And, "This is no time for dawdling, young man." They have twenty seconds. Nineteen.

John presses his lips together, agreement and hesitation written into his body. "Listen, Rodney," he says. "Thanks."

"Right," Rodney replies, flustered; his eyes drop to John's shoulder, collar, throat. He always did find John overwhelming, he remembers now. "Just, you know, make sure you find Teyla and --" He feels he should make a gesture to complete that sentence, but now his hands are clutched together and he can't let go; six, five, four --

He looks up. Their eyes meet for a second before John turns, and leaps.

*

Going home for Rodney was usually a disappointment. Every time he stepped back through the gate on Earth, there was humanity in all its perfidy, petty and unaware. It was not all unwelcome: high-speed downloads of television shows and movies, enough to fill the hours when he needed to quieten his brain; processed food in individual wrappings; the comforting lull of night traffic wending through city streets. He'd spent enough nights on backwater planets to have a strange reaction to the brightness of electricity insisting that half the city was still awake, too. But still, there was little on Earth that could match what he had found in Atlantis.

The first time Rodney left Earth for the Pegasus galaxy, the future was a blank slate waiting to be written on. Now the trip is underwritten by a surety, a certainty: there was a time when the city held everything he wanted. It still holds everything he needs.

He hasn't been in Atlantis for twenty-five years and it feels like relief to step through into a room that hasn't changed in ten-thousand. He gets through the pleasantries with strangers and pushes down the urge to recount past lessons to the shockingly-young science team. He goes back to work. Everything is familiar, the halls, the routine, the hush of doors opening and closing. He half-expects to see John around every corner.

Atlantis is in the tail-end of what passes for winter. From then on Rodney gets up every morning with knees that ache, and at night the sound of deep water goes with him into sleep, well-known, long-expected.


End file.
